


In The Spaces Between The Walls

by Madcinder



Series: Somewhere Far Beyond [3]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Communication, Elder God, F/M, Gen, Great Old Ones, Horror, Immortals in Space, Languages and Linguistics, Linguistics, Lovecraftian, Lovecraftian Monster(s), Mystery, Outer Space, Post-Rebellion Story, Psychological Horror, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-09-27 00:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9941099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Madcinder/pseuds/Madcinder
Summary: When left to sleep unguarded, a myriad of nigh impossible events await the slumbering immortal. A mysterious white-haired young woman is found floating near the core. A brilliant young linguist named Erman Kadestri is tasked with unlocking the unknown language she speaks, so as to find out who she is and where she comes from. Deep within her story lies a mystery, and the answers he seeks may hold unbelievable truths about society and the universe as he knows it. For some legends are very real, and dwell in the spaces between the walls that hold the world together.





	1. Nagisa no Kodoku

Erman was a young man, a great student and rather brilliant linguist. He was the top of his class at the university of Shalvok, and was working on a paper about long-dead languages. He could speak fluently every language known. Still, there was nothing in his skill set that would warrant him having to sign a non-disclosure agreement, at least as far as he could figure. Whatever it was, it had to be important. He signed the paper, and someone finally spoke for the first time since he'd entered the building.

"Please, come this way."

Getting up, he followed the uniformed man down the hall and out of the building to where he was ushered into a black car with black windows. They were taking him somewhere else, now. He couldn't see out, so he didn't know if they were taking him to another sector or if they were just driving in circles, but it took the better part of an hour. When they finally stopped and opened the door for him, he stepped out to find himself deep underground. A grey metallic tunnel that seemed to go on forever in each direction, the only thing breaking the endless grey was the occasional glowing light strip on the ceiling. And the door right beside the car.

"Inside, please."

Through the door he went, which opened like an elevator door. He thought it a little odd, until the small empty room on the other side started going down. At the bottom, the door opened again and he was ushered out into another empty hallway. The need for all this secrecy was weighing heavily on his mind, but at least he was pretty sure it meant they were not there to snuff him out, for whatever reason they might have to do that. At the end of the hallway was a double door, which one of the men guiding him along held open for him. None of them followed him in, instead closing the door behind him without a word. Now he was in an empty observation room, looking down at a strange sight. There was two women in the room below, which he had observed no way of reaching as the hall behind him also had no doors. The only thing he could think of was that the elevator must have had another place to stop. Otherwise, an entirely different and tirelessly long route would be required, and the more he thought about it the more he realized how likely that seemed.

The first of the women was a doctor, obviously. An older lady with white hair, probably several times his age. The second woman was lying in a bed, covered in a thin white sheet. No tubes were connected to her, no machines or instruments, nothing. She was just laying there, her eyes closed. This woman was younger, around his age, had a very unusually light skin tone and long white hair with the faintest hint of either blue or lavender, so faint that he couldn't tell which it was. This certainly didn't seem to be his area of expertise, but he was terribly curious.

The doctor looked up and spotted him. She grabbed a nearby device that really just looked like a green sphere and spoke into it. "The observation room is designed so that I can hear anything you say, and you can only talk and look. What's your name, young man?"

"Erman Kadestri. I assume you know why I'm here."

She nodded. "Yes. You're here to find out about this young lady. Who she is and where she's from."

"What can you tell me to start with?"

"Only that she was found floating around near the core, stark naked. She woke up about a day ago, but we have no idea what she's been saying."

The girl on the bed opened her eyes, like the conversation woke her up. She sat up, and the sheet dropped. She quickly covered herself when she spotted him in the observation room. She said something to the doctor, but it sounded totally foreign to him. Unlike any language he'd heard in his life, and he knew them all.

He cleared his throat. "Is, uh... is it possible for me to come in there?"

Over the course of the next day, Erman was shown to the room so he could sit with the doctor and the young woman. He'd been given a writing pad that he'd requested, as it would make communicating easier. At least, it was supposed to. She understood what it was, clearly, but nothing she wrote or drew made any sense. By the day's end, he'd tried absolutely every letter of every living language and ancient tongue, and nothing looked remotely familiar to her, if he was even reading her facial expressions right.

It had to be past midnight, and the doctor had left to get some sleep, when he was ready to surrender, to give up. They had made zero progress, and he didn't know what step to take next. She was sitting up in the bed, the sheet wrapped around her rather humorously, and the writing pad in her hands. She wasn't doing anything with it. Just sitting and staring at it. Perhaps she was just as frustrated as he was, and was simply hoping, waiting for some idea to come to her. Anything to help.

It had been a very long day and a half since he'd first seen her, and he'd gotten sleep only when she took a nap as well. He leaned back in the chair he'd been given and brushed his fingers through his hair. He looked over her, something he only got away with when she wasn't looking. He didn't know what she was saying, but he felt like her tone was clear enough whenever she caught him looking. She'd snapped at him and even shouted. If only he knew what she was shouting.

He let out a long sigh. "If I could have one wish right now, it would be enough to just be able to say one thing that you'd understand." She looked up at him, narrowing her eyes and trying to determine if he was crossing her boundaries again. "If I could say one thing... it would have to be 'Let me take you out on a date.'. But then, I don't even know if you're familiar with the concept of dates. I'd like to show you what it's like. I... don't really know if they'd even let me take you out of here. I guess not, at least until they know you're not dangerous somehow. But you don't look dangerous. You just look lost. At least as lost as me."

She turned back to the pad and scribbled something on it, then showed it to him. It was a simple, six-part pictograph, possibly a letter. He counted fourteen straight lines, one large curve, and one squiggle that may have been two smaller curves joined together. It was wholly foreign to him, and there wasn't even the slightest hint of what it meant or how to pronounce it, and he observed that it was even far simpler than everything else she'd written or drawn. That is, until she pointed at it and spoke slowly, enunciating each part of the word.

" _N-A-G-I-S-A._ "

He looked over the otherwise senseless lines for a moment, before simply repeating what she'd said. "Nagisa." She nodded. "Nagisa. ...Are you hungry?"

It was pretty clear that she understood how far from the mark he'd hit. She erased the scribbles, which he was beginning to realize may have been an entire word comprised of several letters. She left only the first piece, two parallel lines joined by a diagonal line that went from the top of the parallel line on the left to the bottom of the line on the right. She pointed to the single, simplest thing she'd done yet and made a small sound.

"Nnnnnnnnnnnn..."

It was a letter. It was a letter and that was the sound it made. It looked so simple and easy, so small and insignificant, but it was the door to understanding her. He took the pad and wrote down the rest of the word she'd said before. It was very simple, he had no problem remembering exactly what it looked like. He checked with her to make sure he'd gotten it right, then proceeded to stare at it for several minutes. It took a moment, but knowing how simple the correlation between sounds and letters were, he worked his way through it. There was one letter that was present twice, and he remembered that the word she'd spoken also repeated a sound. The three in the middle followed, if he'd assumed correctly that each letter represented only one sound.

"Nagisa."

She said it faster, slower, and enunciated different parts of it differently, stressing different parts differently, but each time it was the same word. One word could sound so different so many ways, but it was always the same combination of five different sounds and one repeated. What did all the permutations mean?

She finished, pointing to herself. He was worried that body language might also fit into the equation, changing the mean yet again. She tapped her chest with her hand. "Nagisa."

Perhaps it was simpler than that. Perhaps, just like the letters, the word itself carried the same meaning every time, every different way it was said. Maybe... just maybe, it was her name. It seemed like a bit of a jump, but he figured if he were in her position he would attempt to communicate his name. For all he knew, she didn't even understand the concept of a name, but with an obvious written language he figured she probably did. And it was probably Nagisa.

He spent the next whole day tirelessly learning and memorizing the letter system that she used. Not all the letters were as simple, and he learned that many of them made several differing sounds depending on various forms of context, including the formations of the surrounding letters. Being the linguistic student that he was, even this foreign language was not so hard to keep up with all the various rules that he observed from her. He was hopeful that he would be able to start working on full words the following day.

The next day, they began by him teaching her to say his name. She seemed to have trouble with the concept that it was only his name when said with the precise speed, enunciation, stresses. Any variation could possibly mean something totally unrelated to him at all, and he was fully aware that one particular variant was considered offensive. A variant that she seemed to ultimately decide was close enough to his name, settling on just calling him that for the rest of the day. She didn't sound as concerned about his name as he was about her own.

The next thing he learned was that when she patted the bed in order to illustrate another word she'd written for him, the word she uttered did not mean 'pat', 'touch', 'feel', 'hit', or any other action that was remotely synonymous with what she was doing. She proceeded to grab the bed and lift the entire thing over her head, repeating the word before setting it down again. Needless to say, that one moment made him realize just why it may have been a decent choice to have her hidden away so far from the public knowledge. Her small size and pale complexion, which would normally be a telltale sign of illness or at least severe vitamin deficiency, belied a hidden strength that was frightening to say the least. It was a large bed, made of heavy alloys, solid through and through, built to not move without machinery and had the capacity to hold someone nearly thrice her height and up to seven times her body mass.

All this led him to learn the meaning of the word. It was the bed. The word, if he'd been paying attention right, likely referred to beds in general, not differentiating between large or small, who they were made for, hospital beds, restraining beds, sleeping beds, made or unmade, comfy or hard. All beds were called a bed.

Then she wrote down another word and picked up the pillow.


	2. Room For Growth

At one month, Erman had managed to sort out a few more words, but they'd begun to slow in progress. Nagisa had illustrated all the verbs she could think of, and every noun and adjective in the room had been exhausted. There was very little they could progress in those areas without her being allowed to go outside. He had gotten a hang of the alphabet she was using, though he'd also picked up on the fact that she knew more than one. They were working with the absolute simplest, by far the simplest lettering system he'd ever heard of. She had taught him the ins and outs of each letter and how some of them changed depending on context, but the rules were still very basic. It was a language of urgency, near as he could tell. From a culture where time must have been very short. He knew more relaxed languages tended toward longer words.

The only way to get any farther was to show her more things, but that would mean either bringing something down for her to see or taking her up to the surface. He'd said as much to the people in charge of the facility, but there was no way to tell if there was any chance of it happening. He'd been given a place to stay in a facility nearby, deep underground. There were three guard stations in rapid succession between him and the room where Nagisa was being kept, and it took him a good half hour to get through them all, but it wasn't more than two hundred meters. There was nothing for him to do in his room other than sleep, eat, and work on devising better means for communication. They'd given him a small whiteboard and a large one to work with, as well as a pair of markers and a towel for erasing. But he was running short on options.

It was on this day, just as he was heading out of his room to go see Nagisa and spend the day with her, that the doctor he had seen on the first day arrived. A tall man in a military uniform stood behind her. The doctor gave a slight bow, to which Erman responded with a deeper one. She smiled formally. "Erman, this is General Aster. He is here to see the progress you've made."

Erman had been informed that all information regarding Nagisa was to remain in the room with her. He was not to mention anything about her outside that room, even to the guards outside, and certainly not mention her name. He simply bowed to the General. "It's good to meet you. I was just headed there now."

The General returned the bow, far more shallow, but quickly turned away. "We never met, you understand. This did not happen."

"Naturally." Erman figured he could live with that. "Right this way."

He led the two of them through the guard stations, which took three times as long to pass due to there being three of them. Finally through with it all, they entered the small blank room where Nagisa sat alone on her bed. She smiled when she saw Erman, briefly regarded the doctor, and utterly ignored the General. He had expected perhaps some caution or nervousness about him, but she didn't seem interested in his presence at all.

Aster stepped ahead of Erman, then turned back to him. "So... what have you taught her?"

Erman wasn't entirely sure how to approach this. He knew they wanted him to teach her their language, but all he'd really accomplished was learning some of her language. "Alright, so for starters, the language she speaks is actually far simpler than ours, so I thought it would be better to learn how to talk to her than to teach her how to talk to us. We've primarily communicated by repeating a word and demonstrating its definition. It's also a an extremely primitive language, more so than any we have previously been aware of, and as a result I've come to realize that many of the words she says carry the same meaning regardless of most of the defining features of language as we know it. For example, her name is Nagisa. You can say that any way you want, faster, slower, higher, lower, enunciating it however you like, it's still her name somehow. I believe she may have a relatively large vocabulary as a result."

The General didn't seem to care too much about all the things he'd learned, but did latch onto one point in particular. "So it is not related to any known language at all?"

"No sir. Not in the slightest. Her written alphabet is so simple, some letters are comprised of no more than two straight lines."

"That's good." He nodded. "That's very good. You said you learned some of her language, then. Like what?"

He shrugged. "Oh, mostly just verbs and a few nouns. An adjective here or there."

"Verbs and nouns are what we're looking for. Can you give me a demonstration?"

"Sure..." Erman was starting to have misgivings about the General's intentions, but he went along with it. He turned to the subject of the conversation. "Nagisa." She had been watching him the whole time, but seemed to perk up when he said her name. " _Stand_." Reluctantly, she stood up. He thought for a moment before coming up with the right word. " _Spin_." She fixed him with a weird stare, but then complied. He got the feeling she was starting to understand what was going on.

Nagisa spun around once, then stopped and placed her hands on her hips. Finally, she acknowledged the General, looking him up and down. She said something, but Erman only picked up a couple words. The General looked to him, hoping for a translation.

Erman sighed. "We haven't gotten to full sentences yet. I don't know what she said." He paused, then straightened himself out. "Sir, I wanted to make a request. We've run out of things to demonstrate here, so I can't really learn anything more unless we got new material to work with. So, um..."

The General stood over him, a very stern look on his face, but then spoke very reassuringly. "You've made some good progress so far, from the looks of it. If you say you can't do any more here, then tell me what you need. We'll make sure you get it."

He took a deep breath. "I want to take her outside. Maybe have a safe place where she can stay, away from any population centers, but somewhere she can see and learn. I need a more open environment. I was thinking a house, a farmhouse maybe, in the Dhyaseil District. It's quiet, no commotion, they're used to visitors, don't ask questions, and wouldn't have a clue that her language is so unique. It's a great place to keep her away from the public eye, and would make my work so much easier in more ways than one."

The General frowned. "That's a bit much for you to be asking, but I see you're smart about it at least. I'll make sure your request is heard. It may take another month before we can get that done, but I see no reason to decline. I hope to see some progress out of this move, though. Listen to me. I want you to be able to mediate a conversation between her and me within a year. Bare minimum."

He nodded smartly. "I'm on a learning curve. I think most of the hard part is behind us."

* * *

The idea was that there would be no visible guards, so that when Erman and this strange girl entered the Dhyaseil District together, they wouldn't attract any major attention. There were curious neighbors, as there always are when a young couple moves from the city to the country, but they would think nothing odd of two kids making their way in the world. Erman just hoped he would be able to pass himself off as a guy who had married a girl he could barely communicate with. He wondered how long it would take before he was able to explain to Nagisa what the cover story was.

One day, he was shipped out to the Dhyaseil District to take a look at the house that was purchased for them. The farmhouse was now registered as belonging to 'Erman and Nagisa Kadestri'. There were large fields for crops surrounding the house, but nothing had been grown there for a long time. The last owner was a retired millionaire who could afford to just sit back and enjoy the end of his life. It was a good choice, and would allow him and Nagisa room to teach each other. He thought, maybe a bit selfishly, perhaps they could do more than that here. Perhaps they could build whatever life they wanted together.

He arrived by bus, made to look like public transportation but really he was the only one on it. The stop was a mile off from the farm property, which was itself a few miles across. The house was on the close side at least. It was on the long walk in, alone, that he realized how much work it would be to live here. Going anywhere and doing anything required being in shape. He wasn't out of shape, really, but this was something he would certainly have to work on. He reached the path up to the house, another half mile, and realized he had no idea how long it had been since he got off the bus.

Finally, after more walking at one time than he'd ever done in his life, he found himself standing in front of the farmhouse where he would be living for the foreseeable future. He took the next few steps, four steps up onto the front porch and reached out for the door. His first physical contact with the house, touching his fingertips on the door handle, was warm. Everything about the house felt warm. Peaceful. He stepped into the house.

All the rooms were empty. Wide and open, with dusty glass windows framed on the wall. The wooden floorboards and the late glow of sunlight cast a brown-gold atmosphere around him. The walls were thick and well-insulated, keeping the outside temperatures where they belonged and keeping the indoors temperature agreeable. The paint was holding up well for its age, only showing through or flaking off on rare occasions. Every room went the same way, and he started to imagine what it could look like.

Fields of wheat around the house would cast everything in a warmer golden glow. Soft furniture to sit on and look out the window at the world outside. Freshly grown food waiting in the kitchen to be prepared. And Nagisa resting peacefully on the soft cushions of the couch. He shook his head. He was letting his imagination get away from him. He needed to focus on the moment at hand.

The empty silence of the house returned, but the hope it held for him remained. This would be the place he would be staying with her. Maybe there was a General who wanted to command her, and maybe there was a government who wanted to find out where she came from. Maybe she was the point of interest for a number of scientific fields, and maybe no one would ever really know her true nature. All he wanted was to learn to communicate enough so that he could let her know, so that he could tell her, that he had fallen for her from the moment he first saw her.


	3. The First Night

Derek Selestera had lived on his old farm for his entire life, passed down to him by his parents the way was custom. His children had grown up there, and moved away when they were old enough to find their own way in life. Their children and grandchildren visited every year with them, the entire family coming down to the old farm. Derek and his wife Lallesti enjoyed the peaceful quiet of the country, and worked hard in the fields to earn their keep. He was driving home from the general store, sitting at the wheel of an old truck that was old when he was young, when he spotted something that caught his curiosity. He only drove this road once every couple months, as there was little they needed he couldn't produce on his farm. Just sugar, salt, and the phosphorescent fluids that kept the lights on the truck running. So he wasn't sure when someone had moved into the farmhouse along this road.

There was what looked to be a young couple standing out on the porch in front of the house. This meant new neighbors, and the only real way to deal with that was to go and say hello. He turned the old truck up the dirt driveway and made his way over to them. It was another two minutes, watching the farmhouse get closer and closer, and the features of the new neighbors getting more clear. The young man stepped off the porch to greet him, turning back to his partner and pantomiming something to her. Derek thought for a moment that perhaps she was deaf. He pulled up beside them. He wasn't about to get out, in the rare case they didn't want him there, but leaned out the window and held his hand out to the man.

"Hello, neighbor. You just move out to the country?"

The young man reached up and shook his hand. "Yes sir. Name's Erman. This is Nagisa."

"Well, I'm Derek. Me and the wife own the farm just to the West, last one before the border. You should come over soon. We'll welcome you properly to the area." He looked up to where Nagisa was standing on the porch. She was staring intently at him, like she couldn't decide what to make of him. He looked back to Erman. "You speak the language well enough, but I can tell you're not from these districts. Does she not speak the language at all, or..."

Erman smiled knowingly. "Nagisa only knows two languages, to the best of my knowledge. I'm still trying to learn just one of them."

He gave Erman a wink. "Trying to understand what women are saying? Good luck, son. I'll leave you to that then. Don't forget to drop by for dinner."

"When's a good time?"

"Oh, once you're settled in is fine. Our door is always open." With that, he sat up straight in his seat and started off down the driveway, heading for the road.

When the sound of the truck's engine had all but faded into the distance, Erman turned back to Nagisa. He wanted to say something to her now, but he knew there was nothing he could say. She wouldn't understand. He sighed and took his time plodding his way back up the stairs and to the front door. His mind quickly went back to trying to think of where to go next with Nagisa.

* * *

Nagisa was sure she'd heard that language before. The young man clearly could speak it fluently, and it seemed it was the local tongue. But unlike everything else she'd heard anyone say since the day she woke up, this one sounded vaguely familiar. She decided it was best to test the waters with the one phrase she'd tried her best to learn in as many languages as possible. It was the ideal way of learning if this young man had any way to bridge the gap between them.

"Olen nälkäinen."

He looked at her, just staring for a moment before opening his mouth. "Olenal... kinen?"

She tried again. "Olen nälkäinen." She made sure to draw out every sound for him. He seemed to like it better this time, but still shook his head. Nagisa moved on to something else. "Dwi'n llwglyd." He shook his head again. If she was remembering these correctly, she was telling him that she was hungry, but it didn't look like her message was getting through. She wasn't really hungry anyway, but she could stand for something to eat.

She was beginning to wonder if it was worth the time to try and communicate with him.

* * *

The argument had been short and indecipherable, with neither one arguing capable of actually understanding a word coming out of the other's mouth, save the few words Erman had learned from Nagisa. He was pretty sure this was about the beds. His first clue was that she'd started throwing a fit when their beds were put in the same room. He sincerely hoped this wasn't because of some cultural taboo that might ultimately break her trust in him.

She took out the new pad of paper he'd gotten her. He'd thought it was a great idea, considering the adhesive backing. She could label things for him, and had already done so with the front door and the blank walls. This time was different, and it looked like she was going back to her original language, the one she'd shouted at him the first day they met before she started using the even simpler one.

She wrote "馬鹿" and promptly stuck it to his forehead. He really hoped this wasn't some form of ritual curse.

Nagisa proceeded to write something else, and then stuck it on her bed. It read "渚のベッド". She wrote another one and stuck it on his bed. This one said "馬鹿のベッド" She then pointed to his bed and yelled at him. Then she pointed at him and continued yelling. It devolved very quickly into just repeating the one word over and over, increasingly frantic. Part of him wanted to know what 'baka' meant, but the rest of him really didn't.

There was a small meal for the evening, and Erman stood on the porch to watch the last fading light of the day. He could hear the rain starting to fall. Their evening meal would hold him over until the light returned, so he decided he would turn in for some sleep. Walking up the stairs, he quietly stepped into the bedroom. Nagisa was already there, but she didn't seem terribly happy. She saw him and immediately started pantomiming something to him. She traced a big square with her fingers and then made a waving gesture towards her bed.

It took him a few moments to figure out what she wanted, but then he realized she was complaining about something the bed lacked that her previous bed, in the government facility, had on it. A blanket. There was no way to know what kind of blanket she wanted, or if blankets were like beds and all of them were just called blankets. There was a blanket in the back, but it was old and made of a plastic material. It was for keeping crops, tools, or machinery dry overnight, not for keeping people secure in bed.

He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I don't have what you want. We can look for one tomorrow, but we should sleep for now. You'll be fine one time." She calmed down, but her body language told him she wasn't happy about it. It looked to him like she was able to tell from his tone that he wanted to help, but just couldn't. He let out a low sigh, wishing he could help her, but mostly wishing he knew exactly what she wanted. It didn't matter right now, though. It was time for bed.

Nagisa sat on her bed, then rolled onto her back and just lay there, staring at the ceiling. She mumbled something that he couldn't hope to understand. She looked over to see Erman taking off his clothes, and immediately turned bright red. She rolled over, facing the wall beside her bed, and frantically shouting things. He couldn't even tell what she was shouting at or about, so he assumed she was still upset about the blanket. There was nothing he could do about it right now, so he finished taking off his clothes and lay down on his bed. He watched her for a moment, but it looked like she was just going to sleep with her clothes on. He reached over and flicked off the glowing lamp that lit the room, casting it in darkness.

* * *

Nagisa hadn't intended to fall asleep like that, but she had eventually, curled up on the hard bed in a pitch black room. She was pretty sure there were no pajamas for him to have changed into, but didn't know if he'd only stripped down to his underwear. Of course, she had no idea if the people of this world had underwear. If she had to guess, she'd say yes, because she'd gotten some, but it might only be the women.

All the same, when she woke up it was still totally black in the room. She remembered that this room had no windows, so she got up and stumbled her way to the door, walking out and slowly making her way down the stairs and to the front door. She opened it to look outside and find that it was almost as dark outside. There was some barely visible faint glow coming from somewhere up above, but not enough to illuminate anything. She could barely she her own hand less than a foot in front of her eyes. All she could discern was that there was something with mass blocking out what little light was coming from the sky.

She knew the porch had a roof over it, keeping her dry so long as she didn't step out onto the stairs, but that meant she couldn't see where the light was coming from. While there was no light in the chilling cold night, there was the constant near-deafening roar of the rain falling. With the low temperature, she was surprised it wasn't hail or sleet, or even snow. Not that she could see it to confirm it really wasn't sleet.

Nagisa wrapped her arms around herself and sat down on the porch, listening to the rain. She hadn't really been all that tired. Being what she was, it would probably take a lot more to tire her out. Still, she thought, she was pretty sure that she'd slept for a good eight hours. There was no sign of light. She began to wonder how long this planet's day/night cycle was.

Getting a little wet wasn't too much of a problem. She wanted to know where that light was coming from. Nagisa stuck her head out from under the roof and looked up at the raining sky. The rain immediately soaked her, getting in her eyes. It was freezing cold and relentless. There was no way she could keep her eyes open long enough to get a good look at anything. She stepped back under the roof and just stood there, dripping in cold and wet misery in the absolute darkness. There had to be something she could do in the darkness.

She was pretty sure the cold, the wet, and the dark weren't enough to stop her. She stepped out into the rain again, this time she went all the way. She set her bare feet down on the squishy, muddy ground and started walking. Every step, her feet sunk into the mud several inches. She managed, by sheer strength, to pull herself forward. It was hard going, with the rain pounding on her from every direction and her feet getting stuck every step of the way, but she was counting her time and keeping track of her directions. If she started to feel like she wouldn't be able to make it much farther, she would turn back. She knew the way.

She had counted to just over half an hour, and nothing of her environment had changed. The light was still just the one faint glow that she couldn't look for. She mud was no softer, and she sunk no deeper, and the rain was not letting up. Another five minutes, and she felt the dirt under her feet change. Whatever it was made up of was slightly different, and she didn't sink in quite as far, but pulling herself out again was much harder. She remembered the direction she'd taken, straight down the driveway, so she guessed she'd finally reached the road. In only a few dozen steps further, she reached the other side of the road. The farmland here belonged to someone else. It was in use.

Nagisa reached out and caught a stalk of some corn-like crop. It stood up remarkably well in the rain, and when she pulled on it she found that it stayed together very well. She used it to pull herself forward, grabbing the next one and continuing that way. She could still find her way back. She knew that for sure. She still knew that an hour later, who knows how far into the field, when nothing had changed. She could keep on walking, forever it seemed, and never find anything. But then, for all she knew, there was something only a few more steps ahead. It was time to turn back. It would start getting light by the time she got back to the farmhouse, unless this world had nights that were unreasonably long. She couldn't imagine they were so long that someone would die of dehydration between sunset and sunrise. It had easily been ten hours now.

How long could the night be?


	4. Good Afternoon, Good Evening, and Goodnight

This was ridiculous.

Nagisa had made it all the way back to the farmhouse. Her sense of direction had not failed her. She let the rain wash all the mud off of her, and then sat under the porch for a while. It had now been no less than eighteen hours of dark. Nothing had changed at all. Eventually, she got up and went back in, making her way up the stairs and back to her bed, laying down and going back to sleep. She wondered if this darkness would ever end.

* * *

The darkness ended seven hours later, two hours after the rain finally stopped. The world outside the house became light as day in the course of two minutes, as it did every morning. Erman woke up to find Nagisa still fast asleep. She was an odd girl, for sure, if she was still asleep while it was light out. He got himself dressed and, turning back to look at her, found himself getting a bit worried that she was sleeping too long. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, shaking her a little. To his surprise, she slowly opened her eyes and looked up at him. He let out a sigh of relief.

The two of them went downstairs, and Erman headed outside. Nagisa stayed at the doorway, peering out into the morning. It was light now, and the ground looked dry. She couldn't even see any footprints from the night before. She shook her head and retreated back into the house. Erman wasn't sure why she was acting this way, but he wanted to find out, so he followed her back in.

Inside, in the house's main room, he had set up several things that he thought might help them communicate. There was a sand pad in the corner, a small table with a raised edge and a thin layer of sand in it. They would use it for writing words and messages that could be easily erased, to save on paper for that ongoing operation. There was also a canvas, large sheets of paper affixed to a wooden frame, and some graphite sticks to draw with. He hoped that he could find her words for things by drawing the thing, and that way he could learn her words for things he couldn't physically show her.

There were other things set up, and more that he hadn't had the time to set up just yet, but those were the two she'd made use of. She wrote that word, 'baka', in the sand, and then proceeded to start drawing on the canvas. It was certainly curious to watch, as she was sketching something in the bottom corner. When she finished and took a step back, he could see that she'd drawn some kind of house. It wasn't any house he knew in particular, but it was a house. A very crudely drawn house. She then leaned in and made a line across the bottom of the paper that went behind the house. Along that line, away from the house, she made several short lines sticking straight up, with little specks all over their tops. It looked like the crops around a farm.

He pointed to those lines. "Crops? Grain?"

She ignored him, instead drawing a vehicle next to the house. This one looked more specific, clearly supposed to look like the truck that had visited them the previous day, belonging to the old man Derek. There were flaws with her memory of it, but it was clear enough that he could tell. Once that was done, she placed the graphite at the top of the paper, on its side, and dragged its entire length down to the line. She left a little border of smudgy white around everything she'd already drawn, in order to make it all visible, but now almost the entire paper was blackish gray with graphite.

It was the night sky.

Nagisa set about removing tiny little dots of graphite all over the blackness of the sky, so that white speckled the black. He had no idea what those were supposed to be. She suddenly pulled the sheet of paper off the frame and set up the next one. This time, she started by drawing a circle. She drew strange designs and shapes on it. He couldn't see that the shapes had any discernible pattern to them. It was just lines that barely stayed straight for the slightest distance, and there were no curves that made any sense either. Near as he could tell, it was chaotic and random, but she put so much thought and detail into it that there had to be a purpose. It was like she was remembering it.

She shaded in a large portion of the circle lightly, then went to work on the rest of the sheet, adding smaller circles here and there, then a number of tiny spots all over. She then shaded in everything that wasn't inside the circles until it was dark and almost black. She finally stepped back and pointed to the various circles, addressing them with names that he had no basis for understanding. These were things to her, things with names that she knew and understood well, but he had no idea what they were supposed to be. It was either some primitive creation of ancient minds that had to come up with answers for questions they didn't understand, or it was a representation of something beyond his own ability to comprehend. Either he was way beyond her, or she was way beyond him.

Erman pointed to the drawing. "I don't know... what this is. I don't know how to tell you that, but if you can show me how to understand this, I would really appreciate it. You just... work with this. I'll get us something to eat."

It was nearly an hour before he was done preparing the food, which he brought out to Nagisa on a tray and set down on the table beside her. She looked at it briefly, then handed him one of the papers she'd finished with. Setting down his own food, he looked over the paper. There was a depiction of another house, with the truck next to it again, so he understood the size. Next to the house was a tower. She'd set it up so that this tower was gigantic, bigger than anything he'd ever seen save for the capital building. The next paper had more towers, drawn side by side. There were dozens of them, clearly meant to be hundreds of feet tall. He couldn't imagine why she'd decided to draw so many of them all so close together.

Paper after paper made him question more and more about where she had come from. The next one depicted the towers again, only this time they were smaller. It showed them farther away, in the distance, all clustered together in a vast open countryside. If these were meant to be the same buildings, then this scenery was beyond anything he knew to be possible. It stretched on seemingly for miles, hundreds of miles even. The next paper showed the countryside turning to desert on one side, with the tiny city barely visible, huge jagged rock formations in the distance, and the countryside falling to cliffs in the other direction. At the bottom of the cliffs was water. She drew the water on another paper, and endless sea of water, along miles of coastline. It was unbelievable.

Then she handed him a paper that showed the coastline from above. There was seemingly no end to the water or the land. No edge. He couldn't imagine how to contain such a biosphere. She picked up the second picture she had drawn, tracing her fingers along the random pattern lines inside the strange circles, then pointing to the picture of the water meeting the land. Could it be that he was looking at another kind of world, something beyond the walls he knew? It was time, he decided, to find out what she thought was normal.

Erman grabbed Nagisa's hand before she could start drawing another picture and pulled her out the front door. "I know you can't understand me, but there's something I want to check." He figured whoever owned the farmland across the road wouldn't mind if they were just there to look around, so he led her across the road and through the field of crops. He realized he was following a trail of broken crops that hadn't been there the day before. There was no way to know who could have been responsible, so he put it out of his mind. After a short while of walking in a straight line through the field, he found the other edge. It was the nearest point he could find the land met the border.

Nagisa stopped when she saw the border. She held Erman back, her eyes scanning the oddity of nature before her. Seemingly in the center of the field, the world stopped. At the very edge, there was a steel frame wall. The frame was only exposed for the first meter above ground, after which it was covered by a thick shell that acted like a massive screen, displaying the blue sky above them. The screen wall went up into a massive dome that covered the entire district. The sky was fake.

Nagisa reached out and brushed her fingers against the screen wall. "The world is hollow... and I have touched the sky."

The man that accompanied her looked at her, clearly wondering what she had said. Nagisa knew he couldn't understand her words, and now she saw that he really didn't understand her entire concept of the universe. It was just as she had suspected, from the moment she saw his reaction to her drawings. They were foreign to him. The very idea of a world with an open sky was foreign to him. Wherever they were, in some sort of biosphere, closed off from the rest of the universe, he didn't know you could go outside. She had to learn to communicate with him. She had to find out why they were closed off from the rest of the universe.

Then maybe she could find out where the others were.

* * *

" _I can't beat this thing on my own..._ "

A roiling mass of blood red teeth and eyes crawled along an endless gray surface. It swiped a long tentacle, tipped by sharp fangs, aiming to scar the surface and break it open. There was little effect, so it moved on to the next area. There would be a weak spot eventually, and it would find it. It was not short on time. Several of its eyes looked behind it at the shadowy figure following several hundred kilometers behind.

" **Vanish, speck.** "

" _Never. Wherever my friends are, I must protect them from your vile evil._ "

" **Very well. Whenever you have fully healed, you may challenge me again. The result will be no different. How long before you've healed up again? Another ten thousand years? Perhaps I shall find my way in before then. What will you do?** "

Helmet cracked, tail torn, armored bent and marred, cape shredded and sword broken, Oktavia von Seckendorff clenched and shook her fists at the Blood Mad God of The Void. " _I will defeat you. I will destroy you. There is no other choice!_ "

" **Then perhaps I shall end your miserable existence before you heal. You are not such entertainment to me to be worth keeping around.** " Uvhash swiped his clawed tentacles at the next spot. A tiny spot on the surface broke open, and air started pouring out into the darkness of space. " **Finally.** "

Oktavia lifted her shattered sword and charged the massive beast. " _You'll have to kill me first!_ "


End file.
